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Officials say that the crash this week between a U.S. commercial communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite generated possibly thousands of pieces of debris that will hang around in low-Earth orbit for years. Vladimir Solovyov, chief of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS), told reporters today that "debris from the collision could stay in orbit for up to 10,000 years, and even tiny fragments threaten spacecraft, because both travel at such a high orbiting speed." But Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for space debris, says that's not correct. "Most of the debris will be down in decades, some perhaps as long as 100 or more years," Johnson says. He adds that NASA is waiting on military orbit monitors to assess the scene before making an estimated debris count.

"800 kilometers [500 miles] is a very popular orbit for remote Earth sensing and telecommunications satellites," Solovyov said. "The cloud [of debris] from the collision is a serious threat to them."

NASA has not revised its assessment, made immediately following the incident, that the debris clouds pose no significant risk to manned space operations, specifically the ISS and space shuttle Discovery, targeted for a launch later this month.

But some in the space community are using the collision as an opportunity to call for the development of systems to prevent such accidents from happening in the future. At present, space is a free-for-all with no rules of the road. "The collision offers a literally heaven-sent opportunity for the Obama administration to take forceful, visible and long-overdue measures to address a long-ignored issue of 'space debris,'" space consultant James Oberg told the AP.

Schematic showing all the trackable objects in low-Earth orbit before Tuesday's collision courtesy of NASA

4 Comments

1. 1. Luca 03:32 PM 2/13/09

   No problem: You (US) have a new weapon system the so called ABL, Air Born Laser.
   
   It is very simple to locate a ground version wherever You want as an international controllod system in order to protect an international space asset as ISS.
   
   A third neutral country will be a proper location.
   
   An international crew running this AntiDebrisLaser will run this device.
   
   It will run on spare nighttime energy.

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2. 2. rwilliston 01:13 PM 2/16/09

   First, a laser would only be moderately useful with large objects such as a satellite. It would however create a debris problem almost as bad as the current situation. Although the whole star wars concept seems to persist in the imagination, it is highly impractical as a solution to anything. If it could be made to work, it might serve to disable a working satellite but vapourizing it so that it is no longer a threat as a projectile is not presently possible. Correct me if I'm wrong.
   On the lighter side, I worked on specification of the coatings for the Iridium satellite antennae 15 years ago. It is nice to see that they are still functioning beyond their designed lifespan and in this case, aside from possibly a little driver error, the failure was primarily that of the other satellite. Space junk is an exponentially growing problem and this incident illustrates the need for limiting the number of satellites we throw into orbit just so we can all watch CNN and talk to China.

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3. 3. Josh83 in reply to Luca 03:11 AM 2/18/09

   A laser (or any other ASAT technology) would simply take one large piece of space junk and turn it into many smaller pieces of space junk. Each smaller piece is still traveling faster than a bullet and will cause similar damage in a collision.
   
   The space around our planet is just as much a part of our enviornment as our skies & oceans. We need to stop polluting it before it becomes unuseable.

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4. 4. Ehsan M 07:38 AM 2/24/09

   The satellite collision in earth orbit is like nuclear chain reaction where every peice of the collision can cause another accident few subsequent accidents can suddenly cause the loss of the entire satellites in nearby orbits in a matter of days or weeks.
   this requires urgent need for action to prevent further accidents or shooting down satellites from earth.
   with every accident the propbaibilities of further accidents are increased many folds.
   

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